Politics
Before Ascending to Top Tier of F.B.I., Bongino Fueled Right-Wing Disbelief
On a recent episode of his wildly popular podcast, the right-wing provocateur Dan Bongino asserted that he would soon be able to show that pipe bombs found near the Capitol the day of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack were “an inside job” and that “the F.B.I. knows who this person is.”
It is a baseless theory that has spread among the right; the F.B.I. has, in fact, been unable to identify a suspect, despite four years of effort and a $500,000 reward. Nevertheless, Mr. Bongino suggested with furious certainty that the incoming F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, would soon reveal the answer.
“We’re in charge now,” he whispered excitedly.
His conspiratorial-minded views, characteristic of his show, offer a remarkably vivid illustration of his likely approach when he takes over the No. 2 job at the F.B.I. As deputy director, he will effectively serve as the chief operating officer of the premier U.S. law enforcement agency, overseeing the most sensitive cases in the nation. The role will give him access to vast amounts of highly sensitive intelligence, as well as the daily flotsam of rumor, speculation and false accusations that F.B.I. agents receive from informants and the public.
Still, as he talked about his new post on Monday, Mr. Bongino, a failed political candidate who struck gold as a combative, perpetually online Trump supporter, was emotional as he acknowledged that joining the highest echelons of the bureau would require shifting tack.
“We play different roles in our life and each one requires a different skill set,” he said, insisting that he was “cleareyed” about the vision that Mr. Trump, Mr. Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi have for the F.B.I. “I am going to do my best to implement that vision.”
Days earlier, Mr. Bongino offered a glimpse of that vision, playing a clip of the senior White House adviser Stephen Miller declaring, “The existential threat to democracy is the unelected bureaucracy.”
Americans, Mr. Miller said, “vote for radical F.B.I. reform and F.B.I. agents say they don’t want to change.” Mr. Miller’s point was clear: Mr. Trump will succeed in radically changing the F.B.I.
Mr. Bongino has long shouted for such change at the bureau.
He has called for the shutdown of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which handles terrorism and espionage cases. His skepticism dates to an error-laden application by the F.B.I. in seeking to surveil a former Trump campaign policy adviser in 2016 and 2017 with ties to Russia. He has also called for the firing of all F.B.I. agents involved in a court-approved search of Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida.
“What the F.B.I. did to Donald Trump, it wasn’t law enforcement, it was tyranny,” he declared in 2022.
The selection of Mr. Bongino, 50, a former New York City police officer and Secret Service agent, represents a sharp break from the F.B.I.’s history given his relative lack of experience at the agency. For more than 100 years, the second-in-command has been a veteran special agent from within the bureau, someone well versed in its inner workings.
Mr. Bongino’s rise in the world of conservative news media was fueled by what critics describe as a penchant for spreading misinformation — about the pandemic, the 2020 election and the F.B.I.
In 2022, he was banned by YouTube for repeatedly violating the platform’s rules about coronavirus misinformation, including for a video that claimed that masks were useless.
Mr. Bongino started his podcast in 2015, and worked at Fox News and the National Rifle Association’s now defunct streaming service, but it was not until the 2020 election that he ascended to the upper ranks of right-wing punditry.
That same year, he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which led to surgery and chemotherapy.
He quickly became one of the loudest voices casting doubt on Joseph R. Biden’s victory.
When Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, appeared on Mr. Bongino’s show in November 2020, he made an outlandish claim, asserting that voting software from Dominion Voting Systems was secretly being misused.
“We’re basically having our votes counted by Venezuelans,” Mr. Giuliani declared.
“That’s insane,” Mr. Bongino replied. Despite or perhaps because of such baseless claims, Mr. Bongino’s popularity soared as his podcasts and online posts were an insistent drumbeat of doubt about the election results.
(Separately, Dominion, subject to a flood of election misinformation, filed a lawsuit against Fox News, accusing it of spreading harmful conspiracies. The network reached a $787.5 million settlement with the company.)
Last week, Mr. Bongino raged about a number of topics, offering his listeners advice about how to escape if a would-be murderer tried to choke them to death.
He also reprised a pet topic — the F.B.I. investigation into whether the 2016 Trump campaign conspired with Russia in its efforts to influence the presidential election.
In his shows and in a book he wrote called “Spygate,” Mr. Bongino has maintained, like Mr. Trump, that the entire investigation was a pretext to harm Mr. Trump’s political career.
“I don’t want to move on” from that case, Mr. Bongino insisted last week. “I want to find out what happened so it can never happen again.”
On Monday, he assured his audience that he was not quite done offering his thoughts on politics, the government and the culture wars; he plans to keep podcasting this week.
Politics
Dem fundraising giant in the hot seat as GOP lawmakers demand answers over dodged subpoena
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House Republicans are demanding ActBlue, a top Democratic campaign fundraising apparatus, turn over international communications, probing whether the organization knowingly misled lawmakers and dodged subpoenas to hide weaknesses in its screening process to weed out illegal, overseas donations.
House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil, R-Wis., House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., collectively laid out their demands in a letter published on Tuesday.
“For more than a year, the Committees have conducted oversight regarding ActBlue’s ‘fundamentally unserious approach to fraud prevention,’” the letter reads.
“Recent reporting … strongly suggests that ActBlue deliberately obstructed the Committees’ investigation, including through misleading statements and noncompliance with our subpoenas.”
BREAKING THE FOURTH WALL: LEFT-WING GROUPS DEFIANT AS GOP SHEDS LIGHT ON GROUPS TIED TO CHINA
Rep. Jim Jordan leaves a House Republican Conference meeting at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 10, 2024. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc)
The letter is addressed to Regina Wallace-Jones, the CEO and president of ActBlue, and is the most recent entry in investigations that began in 2023 when Republicans originally raised concerns about foreign donations possibly influencing American elections.
It also follows New York Times reporting on a memo from Covington & Burling, a law firm, warning that gaps in its screening armor could present “a substantial risk for ActBlue.”
The memo, on its own, does not implicate wrongdoing or indicate that ActBlue accepted international donations. Even so, the reporting caught the eye of Republicans in Congress.
Steil, Jordan and Comer are collectively asking ActBlue to produce two internal documents to examine the internal understanding ActBlue may have had about its own weaknesses.
The first is a resignation letter from General Counsel Aaron Ting — a document Republicans contend centers on liabilities created by ActBlue’s donation security.
Republicans believe the second, a message from ActBlue’s former legal counsel Zain Ahmad, relates to an ignored whistleblower complaint about those practices.
HOUSE HEARING RAISES RED FLAGS OVER FORMER TECH MOGUL’S ‘CCP NETWORK’ ALLEGEDLY FUNDING OF FAR-LEFT GROUPS
House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer (R-KY) speaks to the media on his Committee’s investigation into former President Joe Biden’s cognitive state, in the Rayburn House Office Building on July 24, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Republicans have already requested those documents before, but haven’t received them.
“There is considerable reason to believe that ActBlue may have deliberately withheld this responsive material to impede our investigation,” the letter states.
For its own part, ActBlue has claimed it makes every effort to ensure its fundraising complies with legal requirements.
In ActBlue’s own letter published in Nov. 2023, Wallace-Jones, the CEO, affirmed that the organization maintained the highest standards for scrutiny of its fundraising.
“Our approach is multilayered, with checks and confirmations occurring throughout the donation process to verify donors and donor information,” Wallace-Jones wrote.
“These measures, which include compliance measures, technological tools, and manual reviews, help to ensure the identity of donors, root out potential foreign contributions, and protect donors from financial fraud.”
OVERSIGHT DEMANDS DOJ ANSWERS ON FOREIGN FUNDING OF AGITATOR GROUPS AS IRAN, ANTI-ICE PROTESTS CONTINUE
Regina Wallace-Jones of Palo Alto soaks up the first evening of the DNC Convention at the United Center in Chicago, IL on Monday, August 19, 2024. (Photo by Yalonda M. James/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
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Republican lawmakers have given ActBlue two weeks to produce the requested documentation, setting a deadline for April 28, 2026.
“Absent these steps, the Committees are prepared to use available mechanisms to enforce our subpoenas,” the letter reads.
Politics
Swalwell scandal sparks fears of deeper rot on Capitol Hill
WASHINGTON — Eric Swalwell’s downfall has raised the possibility of a broader reckoning on Capitol Hill as congressional staffers, reporters and opposition researchers race to verify long-standing rumors of a sordid underground culture among the city’s most powerful.
Former lawmakers across the political spectrum have warned for years of a hushed congressional bacchanal marked by inappropriate revelry and sexual misconduct. But a sense of growing momentum gripped Congress on Tuesday, as Democrats grappled with Swalwell’s resignation and Republicans called for other lawmakers to face scrutiny.
The 72-hour collapse of Swalwell’s political career has shifted attention not only to his closest associates in Congress, but also to a larger set of sitting lawmakers from both parties suspected of lurid sexual activity. Several members have claimed that Swalwell’s alleged behavior was an open secret amid a cacophony of rumors on social media of other potential offenders.
“I think that many people knew about this for a while,” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican, said in an interview with The Times.
Luna, who planned to lead the charge to expel Swalwell before he resigned, alleged that young staffers would talk among one another about Swalwell’s conduct. Lawmakers should have done more to approach him about the rumors, she said.
Multiple current and former female staffers who spoke with The Times described a broader culture of warning one another about lawmakers with reputations for inappropriate conduct.
But the warnings, passed privately among junior aides, have focused on “sleazy” activity and boundary-crossing behavior, said one former legislative aide, who asked to remain anonymous. Whispers about sleazy behavior generally do not meet the coverage threshold for traditional newsrooms, which are bound by strict ethical standards.
Another former aide said that quiet guidance shared among female staffers focused on behavior that is legal, but nevertheless viewed as unprofessional and unbecoming of members of Congress — a line that has prevented many from speaking out publicly.
Now, a race is on for leverage between two political parties facing comparable strategic risks — each with members facing growing questions over their alleged conduct — and for scoops among news outlets, seeking to break the story first.
The Monday resignations of Swalwell and Texas Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales, who faced his own sex scandal, was also forcing lawmakers to address the issue publicly. Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) — one of Swalwell’s closest friends in Congress — answered questions from reporters at length Tuesday, telling them he should have confronted Swalwell when he heard rumors about his behavior.
“You let your guard down. I let him into my circle. … I deeply regret it,” Gallego said.
He denied knowing about Swalwell’s alleged misconduct when asked about the behavior.
“Look, we socialized. We went out. But I never saw him engage in any of the predatory behavior, harassment, sexual assault,” Gallego said.
Notably quiet was President Trump, who has faced sexual assault accusations of his own and frequently parried with Swalwell throughout his presidency. Although Trump posted an article reporting Swalwell’s resignation on social media, he has not commented on the matter in his own words.
The unraveling scandal comes at a time when lawmakers have come together across party lines to push for transparency in the case of Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender and alleged sex trafficker whose network of powerful associates included Democrats and Republicans alike.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Meanwhile, details of the Swalwell scandal continued to unfold Tuesday, as a Beverly Hills woman accused him of drugging and raping her in 2018. The Times could not immediately reach his attorney; he previously denied allegations of rape and sexual misconduct made by multiple women in published accounts last week.
Sex scandals are not a new phenomenon on Capitol Hill, which has seen over a dozen members embroiled in controversy over the last decade, including Katie Hill of California, Cory Mills and Matt Gaetz of Florida, and Blake Farenthold of Texas, among others.
But several prominent former members — including former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — have warned of a more widespread cultural problem.
“Every member in Congress knows not to let any young staffer get around Swalwell or Matt Gaetz. It’s not a secret there,” McCarthy said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”
Luna had pressed lawmakers to address alleged sexual misconduct on Capitol Hill. In February, she called on the “predatory freaks” in Congress to leave office as she complained about the process to get ethical complaints handled.
“It pisses me off because while some of us are actually working and busting our asses, these clowns are sexually harassing their own staff, doing illegal crap, insider trading etc,” Luna wrote at the time.
Luna said Monday that she was encouraged to see bipartisan support for expelling Swalwell and Gonzales.
A longtime staffer who spoke on condition of anonymity said Tuesday that allegations against Swalwell have sparked conversations about how to do more to help staffers report sexual misconduct, such as reforming procedural rules that would allow staffers to report any of their concerns directly to ethics panels, and about the need for ethics investigations to move more quickly.
“Congress has a short-term memory, that is the difficulty here,” the staffer said. “After these guys leave their seats, there needs to be a concerted and consistent effort for reforms to be established and be made permanent.”
Politics
Video: Vance Says Pope Should Stay Out of U.S. Affairs
new video loaded: Vance Says Pope Should Stay Out of U.S. Affairs
transcript
transcript
Vance Says Pope Should Stay Out of U.S. Affairs
Vice President JD Vance weighed in on the tension between President Trump and Pope Leo XIV as Catholics expressed dismay about Mr. Trump’s attacks.
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“I certainly think that in some cases, it would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality, to stick to matters of, you know, what’s going on in the Catholic Church and let the president of the United States stick to dictating American public policy.” “I don’t think that the message of the Gospel is meant to be abused in the way that some people are doing. And I will continue to speak out loudly against war, looking to promote peace.” “Pope Leo said things that are wrong. There’s nothing to apologize for. He’s wrong.” “I’m not a big fan of Pope Leo. He’s a very liberal person. I don’t think he’s doing a very good job.” “I did post it, and I thought it was me as a doctor, and it had to do with the Red Cross. There’s a Red Cross worker there, which we support.” “It’s terrible. It’s gross. It’s blasphemous.” “I stand with the pope. I mean, the pope speaks the Gospel. He speaks for peace.”
By Shawn Paik
April 14, 2026
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